Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown

by Roy Chubby Brown

  ‘Hello, John, how are you?’

  ‘Bit of bad news for you, Colin.’ It was the copper. He told Dad what I’d done.

  ‘Oi! Up them stairs now!’ Dad shouted from the doorway. ‘Go on, yer little bastard.’

  I heard Dad talking to the copper. Then his footsteps on the stairs. ‘Why do I put up with you, you thieving little bastard?’ he demanded. ‘Where is the money?’

  ‘I spent it, Dad.’

  ‘Spent it? Spent it! You’ll get no more money off me – now get in that bedroom and don’t come out. I’ve brought up a thief. A thug! A bloody vandal.’

  A few days later I made my first appearance in a magistrates’ court. I was fined twenty pounds for stealing the shoes, which annoyed Dad all the more because he had to pay the penalty. ‘Little bastard, you’re no good,’ he screamed at me as he laced my arse with his belt yet again that night. ‘You’ll never be any good.’

  Not long after that, I was sent to Medomsley Detention Centre for six weeks for throwing bricks and bottles and fighting while hanging around outside the Commercial, the roughest pub in South Bank. I’d become the black sheep of the family and visits from the bluebottles had become a frequent occurrence. Usually it was about something missing, often little more than oggy raiding – pinching apples – from the stall outside the greengrocer. They were small pickings, but to us pathetically petty thieves it seemed like gold bullion.

  ‘The police are here,’ my auld fella would announce with a weary tone. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘Nothing!’ I would always say. ‘I haven’t done anything. I wasn’t … it was …’

  ‘It’s always Mr Nobody, isn’t it?’ Dad would say. ‘It’s never you, is it?’

  I was more frightened of my auld fella than I was of the filth, even if they took me down to the police station. Dad would have to come with me and promise the police that if they dropped the charges, he’d go home and give me a good hiding. I felt the back of my father’s hand across my ears or his belt across my arse several times a week in those days. Or it would be his boot up my backside.

  The more I got in trouble, the less I worried about it. I’d thieved so many times that it had become an everyday thing and I’d become immune to the threat of punishment. And as I became more blasé, I reasoned why pinch apples when I could rob a bank? With my mates, I climbed up church towers to remove lead from the roofs. We’d take it to Elsie Hines, a scrapyard in Slaggy Island. We all thought we were commandos or cat burglars, not petty thieves. To us, thieving seemed glamorous and exciting.

  My greatest coup came one evening when I’d gone down to the Unity Club to see if my Dad would give me some money for some chips. When the doorman went in search of my auld fella, I noticed a big black bicycle with a light on it.

  Fucking hell, I thought, that’s a cracking bike.

  So I took it. It was that large, I couldn’t swing my leg over the crossbar, so I put my leg through the frame and pedalled it home like that.

  Everyone had a wash-house at the back of their house, where they kept their mangle, a few spades, some tools and maybe a wheelbarrow. Digging around in the dark, I found some spanners in a toolbox and removed the bike’s wheels, the seat and the light. Finding some paint, I sprayed the bike white and black. I was capped with it. Hey, I’ve got myself a proper bike, I thought.

  At about quarter past eleven that night, my father came in.

  ‘I was gonna come down and get some money for chips off you, Dad,’ I said, ‘but the man at the door said you were too busy.’

  ‘Aye, some bastard’s pinched Sergeant Carr’s bike from outside the club tonight.’ Sergeant Carr was our local bobby. And he was a right bastard.

  Shit, I thought. That bike was now standing in our wash-house.

  ‘If Sergeant Carr finds out who’s took his bike,’ Dad said, ‘he’ll get ten years in prison. He’ll get the worst …’

  My heart was thumping in my chest and my legs were wobbly as I went up to bed that night. Lying awake as rigid as a corpse, I waited until my auld fella went to sleep and started snoring. I knew that once he started, nothing would wake him. I went down to the wash-house, got the shovel out and carefully lifted up all Dad’s prize cabbages in the back garden. Digging about a foot down, I buried the bike in the vegetable bed, covering it with soil and carefully placing the cabbages back in their precise rows on top of the bike. I was petrified Dad would find out.

  Dad got up at half past seven the next morning and went to work, walking straight past the cabbage patch. He hadn’t noticed a thing. Out in the garden, even I couldn’t see any sign of the cabbages having been moved.

  I never removed Sergeant Carr’s bike from the vegetable bed. With the police often automatically assuming that I was behind any theft, Sergeant Carr was a frequent visitor to our house and I was always worried that he’d somehow stumble on his bike, maybe spotting its handlebars poking out of the cabbage patch.

  ‘Your Roy broke into Roger’s fruit shop last night. He was clearly seen,’ Sergeant Carr insisted to my father on one of his many visits.

  ‘Oh aye, was he?’ Dad said.

  ‘Yes, he was seen climbing the back-alley wall, breaking in the shop, and we’ve got a witness.’

  ‘I don’t think you have. If you did then Roy must have fucking long arms because he’s sixty miles away camping. He was only talking to me on the phone last night.’

  Sergeant Carr gave Dad a blank look.

  ‘Our Roy is with the Grangetown Boys’ Club. He’s camping in Scorby.’ It was near Scarborough. ‘He’s been there since Friday. So if somebody saw him in Grangetown, our Roy would have walked sixty miles. I think you better get your facts right.’

  It was one of the few times the auld gadgie was really chuffed with me, although it was short-lived. Dad had paid seven and six for me to go away for the week with about a dozen other lads. We slept in a big tent beside a lake. Most days were spent rowing tubs on the lake, but one day one of the supervisors made a big target out of straw so that us lads could make spears to throw at it. When it come to my turn, I let go of my spear too early and it went straight through Edmond Saul’s leg, so I returned home under a cloud and had to visit Edmond in hospital. Shortly after that, I was in even bigger trouble with my auld fella.

  Every summer, Crow’s Fair pitched up on a patch of wasteland at Slaggy Island, near where we’d catch the trolleybuses into Middlesbrough. I loved the smell of hot dogs and candy-floss, and I would go on all the rides with my mates. The waltzers had always been my favourite, but this year we were more interested in the tattooist’s tent. After much egging-on, Robbie Hutchinson went in first for a tattoo and promptly passed out. Thinking I was the hardest, I went in last and made sure that I got the largest tattoo of the four of us, gritting my teeth and pretending it didn’t hurt at all as the tattooist carved True Love Jacqueline and a red rose on my left arm. Jacqueline was a girl in my class. We hadn’t even spoken; I just liked the look of her.

  For the next few days, I kept my sleeves rolled down at home. After about five days, the scab fell off and the tattoo was revealed in all its glory. I was so proud. I thought I really looked the part. I dabbed a bit of Vaseline on it and rolled my sleeves up as I waltzed into school, swinging my jacket over my shoulder so that everyone could see it. I thought I was the hardest nut in Grangetown.

  The next night, there was a letter waiting on the kitchen table when my auld fella got home. ‘Can I have a look at your arms?’ he said after reading it.

  I rolled up my right sleeve. ‘Nowt there,’ I said. ‘See?’

  ‘And your other one.’

  I rolled up my left sleeve.

  ‘What’s that?’ Dad demanded.

  ‘A transfer.’

  ‘A transfer? What kind of a transfer?’

  ‘It’s just like a transfer, like.’

  ‘Does it wash off?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘Well, go and wash it off then.’

  ‘Can I not
leave it on for a couple of days?’

  ‘No! Get it washed off now!’

  I went upstairs, shitting myself. What am I going to say? I wondered. What am I going to do? I went back downstairs. ‘Dad, it won’t all come off ’cos it’s like ink, you know.’

  ‘Go and wash it off.’

  ‘Er, I’ve got a confession to make …’ I said. ‘It’s a tattoo.’

  ‘You stupid … you bloody stupid … you’ve marked yourself for life!’ Dad screamed. ‘Where do you get your brains from? You really are as thick as shit. You stupid …’ Once again, the day ended with me in trouble and my father’s belt lacing my arse.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FIRST STEPS

  NEWS OF MY CANCER spread around the comedy circuit like wildfire. Within days, I’d received hundreds of phone calls and emails. Letters arrived from America, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Hong Kong, from fans and from other comedians, all of them wishing me the best.

  ‘I wish I could come and put my arms around you,’ one of the letters said. It was from someone I’d never met, a fan in Canada. It touched me deeply, the thought of complete strangers wanting to see me fit and healthy back on stage. And closer to home, friends and relatives dropped by to wish me good luck. People I hadn’t spoken to for years crawled out of the woodwork. And, best of all, I started to see my kids again. They began coming around the house every other day or so.

  Amidst the gloom and my worries about my future, glimmers of hope emerged. If the cloud had a silver lining it was that for the first time in my life I felt that when I really needed support I got it. Everyone was there for me. I’d thought I was losing my family for the second time in my life, that they were too busy for me, that they were doing their own thing, forming their own lives with their children and my grandchildren. But as soon as they heard I was ill they all came around.

  To be honest, all the sudden attention was a bit of a pain in the arse. I was forever opening the door to visitors at a time when I didn’t want to strain my voice as I still had a few shows to do. The tour was off, but it was too short notice to cancel five imminent gigs. I was contracted to do them and I wanted to do them. Thinking it might be the last time I would ever work on stage, I put every last ounce of energy into preparing for those performances but, try as I might, my mind wasn’t quite on the job. I wasn’t as good as I would usually be. I knew it and by the final night, I pulled myself together. The last show was a barnstormer.

  As I walked off stage, the theatre packed to the rafters, the audience chanting ‘You fat bastard, you fat bastard’, the tears rolled down my cheeks. The stage had been my salvation, delivering me from a life of trouble and crime. Without it, I was little more than the urchin who’d caused so much trouble in Grangetown.

  The only thing that slowed my mischief-making was a growing interest in girls and sex. Dad had been bringing women back to the house for a couple of years by then and by the time I was fourteen I’d got my first tantalising glimpse of a naked woman. I’d walked into Dad’s bedroom to find one of his conquests standing in the middle of the room with absolutely nothing on. I’d never seen anything like it and I was shocked as much as I was fascinated. ‘Get out, you mucky little bastard!’ she shouted. I was confused. What had I done wrong?

  ‘I saw my Dad’s girlfriend’s fanny last night!’ I bragged at school the next day. All the lads were fascinated.

  ‘Did you? What was it like?’ they said.

  ‘Oh, it looked like a big black spidery thing!’ I said.

  My own interest in women was taking time to develop, but like any adolescent I had a vivid fantasy life that made up for a lack of any real action. Anybody of my age knows about Spick and Span. They were little black and white magazines with pictures of ladies in their underwear. By today’s standards they were quite harmless; you see more now in a home shopping catalogue. I was in my bedroom one afternoon, looking through Spick and Span and doing what any teenage boy would do in the circumstances. The next thing I knew, Dad was standing in my bedroom. ‘Roy!’ he shouted.

  I jumped up. ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Your tea’s ready, you mucky little bastard!’

  I’d fallen asleep with my trousers down and my hand in my pants. It was obvious what I’d been up to and my father had caught me red-handed. I didn’t dare go downstairs.

  Compared with other lads in my class, I was a late starter. They were always bragging about what they were getting up to with girls. One day, Derek Harland, who was a couple of years younger than me, turned up at my house with two girls. ‘These girls want fucking,’ he said as I opened the door.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Er … our Dad’ll go mad.’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ Derek said. He took Cynthia, a fat lass I knew from around Grangetown, and he fucked her on our stairs while me and this other girl I’d never met stood watching. I don’t know whether Cynthia’s friend expected me to follow Derek’s lead. She certainly didn’t come on to me and I was just not that way inclined. I was a little bit shy and naive when it came to girls. Although I had no qualms about pinching things, getting drunk or fighting in the street, I had scruples about the right way to treat women and that stopped me taking advantage. I was from a staunch Methodist family – Sunday school and things like that – and despite being the black sheep of the family I had stronger morals than many of the lads with whom I kicked around. I can’t help thinking that the absence of my mother, and to some extent my sister, played a part in my attitudes towards girls when I was a teenager. Maybe it had made me scared of women; I certainly wasn’t used to their company. Or maybe it made me put girls on a pedestal, as if they were something special and delicate that needed to be handled carefully because they were so rare in my life.

  At that time I knocked around in a gang of about five or six lads. We all had nicknames. There was Sweaty, Namda, Baz, Carless, Panda and I was Spud. Spud Vasey. How any of us got those names I don’t know. We were all in the same class and we had the same interests. We’d meet on a corner at five o’clock at night and wander the streets. When we were old enough, we joined the Boys’ Club, where we’d play table tennis and do sports. I was good at basketball and a fast runner over a hundred yards. A hundred and one yards and I was fucked, but over one hundred yards I was good. I also got into painting, winning a local painting competition. I used to draw cartoon characters on the walls at home. Our bathroom had Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. They were that good that my auld fella would say: ‘You’ll be a cartoonist one day.’ But, like most things, I lost interest in it. I didn’t have any idea of what I would do in the future. I just took each day as it came and never thought I’d amount to anything.

  On Saturday evenings, the lads and I would go to a dance at Grangetown Boy Scouts hut. Local bands would play rock-and-roll and ballad standards of the day – ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘A White Sports Coat and a Pink Carnation’. The girls wore pleated skirts and the lads stood around trying to look hard. We were all Teddy boys, taking our lead from the New Musical Express, which had pictures of Lonnie Donegan, Alma Cogan, Frankie Vaughan and Mel Tormé. Cliff Richard was just coming through and I used to think I was just like him. I’d spend ages in front of the mirror in my bedroom, which I’d surrounded with pictures of Cliff, combing a DA into the back of my hair and teasing out a curl at the front. Barry Gerrard, who had the best quiff in Grangetown, used to give me tips on how to comb my hair. One evening, down at the Scout Hut, I thought I’d never looked better when Barry turned to me. ‘What’s that smell?’ he said.

  ‘What smell?’ I said.

  ‘I can smell something,’ Barry said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s your hair,’ Barry said. ‘What’s them bits in your hair?

  ‘Them little bits?’ I said. ‘What?’

  ‘It looks like little bits of bacon and egg.’

  ‘You told me to get some lard and put it on my hair.’

  ‘Not out of the fucking pan! Fresh stuff!’ Barry sai
d. The smell was overpowering.

  When Sweaty, Namda, Baz, Carless, Panda and I weren’t hanging out on street corners or going to dances, we’d pinch motorbikes and cars, dumping them when they ran out of petrol. We were no different from the joyriders that nowadays plague inner cities.

  I met a lad called Terry who was particularly good at putting two wires together and starting up a car or bike. Between us, we decided to buy an old black Austin off an auld fella for eight pounds each. It wasn’t taxed or insured, but Terry was what we called a sandscratcher – he lived in Redcar, on the coast – so we decided the best way to avoid the attention of the bluebottles was to fill up the tank and drive the Austin from Redcar to Warrenby, which had one long road that went along a breakwater to a pier head. There’d be no traffic there, we reasoned, just a few fishermen’s huts.

  We spent all day at Warrenby, taking it in turns to drive along the breakwater, until at about five o’clock we ran out of petrol. ‘We’ll leave it and take the can,’ I said to Terry. ‘We’ll get the can filled and bring it back to the car in the morning.’

  The next morning we walked to the garage, a good five miles from the breakwater, and filled the can. As we approached the breakwater we could see a group of men in the distance, but nowhere near where we’d left the car. Some of them were wearing peaked caps. ‘What’s happened there?’ I said.

  ‘I think it’s the police,’ Terry replied.

  ‘Eh, we’d better just walk the other way. Maybe they’ve found the car and discovered it isn’t taxed or insured.’

  We made a detour around the sand dunes, then sat at a distance, watching and waiting. After about an hour the men dispersed. We walked up to a bloke wearing a hard hat.

  ‘Hiya, mate!’ I said.

  ‘All right?’ he replied.

  ‘There’s coppers there,’ I said. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Some fucking idiot’s left a car on the railway track.’